01 April 2012

Living With Puppets: The World of Kihachirō Kawamoto (1999)

Takashi Namiki
(なみきたかし, b. 1952) of Anido has been documenting the
world of animation both at home and abroad since the 1970s through his
writings, photographs, and by collecting materials for his private
archive. Last fall, I wrote about his
book Animated People in Photo, which is a photo essay of his
encounters with animators and animation festivals over the years. His 1999 documentary film Living With Puppets: The World of Kihachirō
Kawamoto (人形と生きる〜川本喜八郎の世界) screened on Day 3 of the Kawamoto-Norsteinevent at Forum des Images in Paris. It
was introduced by Ilan Nguyen (Tokyo
University of the Arts), who said that he believed that it was the first time for
the film to screen outside of Japan.

The subject of the documentary is
not Kawamoto the puppet animator, but Kawamoto the puppet maker and puppet
theatre director. Starting in 1972,
Kawamoto joined forces with his good friend Tadanari Okamoto to host a number of puppet animation festivals
known as the Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet
Anime-Shows. As they did not produce enough animated
shorts to fill a full programme, Kawamoto came up with the idea of including
live puppet theatre performances. Not
only would this lengthen the programme, but live shows could also incorporate
the humorous aspects of puppet performances.
Apart from his first independent animation The Breaking of Branches is Forbidden (1968), Kawamoto’s animated
works tend to be more serious and contemplative. Yet everyone who knew Kawamoto personally
speaks of his warm sense of humour. The
live puppet shows demonstrate this other side to his personality.

The Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet
Anime-Shows ceased in 1980, and with Okamoto passing away in 1990, a revival of
the event seemed unlikely. However, 27
years after the first Kawamoto + Okamoto event, Kawamoto decided to put on the
puppet show one more time. Namiki’s film
documents the event from the cramped rehearsals in Kawamoto’s tiny Sendagaya
studio to the one night only performance at the Mitsukoshi Theatre in September
1999. The show featured a parade of the
puppets from the NHK drama Romance of the
Three Kingdoms (三国志/Sangokushi) as well as performances
of four original theatrical works written by Kawamoto:

Hito mo Migakite no Chi ni Koso (人も磨き手後にこそ)

This puppet play was performed at
the first Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Show in 1972. It features an old, tattooed man in a sentō (communal bath house). When bathing in Japan, one first squats with
a shower or water in a basin. One must
wash oneself thoroughly before entering the communal hot bath. The tattooed man sits with the wash basin
blocking the view of his penis from the theatre audience. This is a wordless drama in which the comedy
comes from the fact that the man’s movements are in time with the accompanying
classical music. As the tempo increases,
so too do his movements with dramatic pauses being made comical by him tipping the wash basin towards his private parts. At one point,
the increase in tempo and volume results in him quite vigorously scrubbing his
penis which caused a great deal of laughter.
Another uproarious moment occurs when he stretches out his arm and plays
it like a fiddle – in the style of an air guitar performance.

There is also the humour of
familiarity in this piece, as public bathing is an important cultural tradition
with etiquette that all of the audience members would recognize. Thus another funny sequence involves the old
man trying to get from the wash basin to the hot bath in a dignified manner by
trying to hold the small white towel over his private parts. He
then sticks his toe into the bath and jumps back in shock at how hot the water
is, before easing himself in.

If I had seen this puppet play
before hearing Ilan Nguyen and Serge Éric Ségura’s lecture on the life
and career of Kawamoto, I would have presumed that the old man was a yakuza because of his ornately tattooed
body. Nguyen and Ségura revealed that
Kawamoto himself had elaborate tattoos on his back and upper arms that he
acquired in the late 1950s / early 1960s in order to mark himself as an
individual. With this in mind, it is
likely that there is an element of autobiography to this amusing piece.

Kurui toki no Kami da no mi (くるしいときのカミだのみ)

This puppet play was performed at
the first Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Show in 1972. Like

Hito mo Migakite no Chi ni Koso, this puppet play is a wordless physical
comedy set to music. It features a salaryman
going to the toilet – quite literally “toilet humour”! The title suggests that the struggle that one
sometimes has on the toilet can be a religious experience.

Good Night, I said! (おやすみなさいったら！/Oyasumi-nasaittara!)

This comic puppet play was performed at
the first Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Show in 1972. It is also set to music. All parents struggle with getting their kids
to bed at night. In this puppet drama
the struggle is multiplied as a mother tries to convince four babies to go to sleep. The piece is performed to the
German lullaby “Schlafe, mein Prinzchen, schlaf’ ein” by Mozart. The mother dozes off herself while waiting
for her little ones to sleep and the babies crawl around under the
blankets. The large bed is vertical on
the stage and leaning slightly backward so as to accommodate both the spectators
watching the action and the puppeteers.

Scheming
World from Inside and Out(世間胸算用近頃腹裏表/ Seken Munazanyou Chikagoro to Tatemae)

This puppet play was performed at
the fifth Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Show in 1976 and was also a part of
the reprise event in 1979. In an introductory
interview Kawamoto explains that audiences found the subject matter of
this play quite shocking when it was first performed. Times have changed in the ensuing quarter
century and he thinks that the audience in 1999 will find it fairly tame.

This puppet play does have dialogue
and concerns the inner workings of a Japanese home. Traditionally in a Japanese family, when the
eldest son marries he becomes the head of the family. This usually means that three generations of a family will live together under one roof. Unsurprisingly, this often results in the new
wife and her mother-in-law butting heads on the way in which the household is
run. Mother-in-laws tend to have very
fixed ideas about how to manage the home having been in charge of their own homes for at least two decades. The young wife may bring modern ways or even different ways of doing things learned from her own mother into the home. No matter what one's cultural background, we can all recognize that this is a recipe for trouble.

This puppet play reenacts the strife that results from his scenario with the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law being sweet to each other’s
faces but saying things to each other that are either sarcastic or have a
double-meaning. Behind each other’s
backs they complain about each other and take out their frustrations with
having to live together on the chores.
The mother-in-law takes out her frustration on the laundry. She even goes so far as to spit on her
daughter-in-law’s shirt before ironing it.
Her main complaint is that she things her daughter-in-law is lazy and
unskilled in housework.

The daughter-in-law is mainly upset at the restrictions her mother-in-law imposes on her life. On this day, her mother-in-law has chosen not to go out, and this means that the daughter-in-law must also stay at home at do chores when she would rather be gossiping with her friends. She cannot allow the mother-in-law does not do all the
chores and take all the credit for the housekeeping. The daughter-in-law takes out her frustration on preparing
supper. She attacks the fish with all
her pent up rage. At the end of the play,
the mother-in-law pretends to enjoy the food her daughter-in-law has prepared
and the daughter-in-law feigns delight with her neatly shirt. The masks of domestic harmony are back up again and the women
continue in their struggle to live together for the sake of the family.

One only gets a taste of these puppet
plays for the original theatrical performance lasted 3 hours and the
documentary is a comfortable 40 minutes. The
puppeteers, in the tradition of Bunraku,
perform entirely in black with the faces also masked in black. It was hard to tell if they were also using 3
puppeteers for each puppet as I was so wrapped up in the performance that I
forgot to pay attention. The puppets
were large and did have a minimum of 2 puppeteers – as you can see in the screencaps
of the performances.

Kawamoto wrote, directed, produced,
and performed in the puppet dramas. He
talks at some length about the craft of the puppet theatre and the challenge of
preparing the puppeteers for the performance – they were quite young and many
were new to puppeteering. Most of
Kawamoto’s original collaborators had either passed away or had moved on to other
things in their lives since the 1970s.
He mentioned one puppet master in particular named Koga who had passed
away and whom he greatly missed. They
spent two months rehearsing for the performance. In order to bring the puppet convincing to
life, Kawamoto explained that the performers need to have mutual respect for each other and work
towards being in harmony with one another.
Although they made a few errors during the live show,
Kawamoto seemed content with the final result.

The documentary is a very low resolution
video with amateur English subtitles.
However, the singularity of the subject matter makes the film must-see
viewing for fans of Kawamoto and scholars of Japanese puppet theatre. It reveals a very different side of Kawamoto
as not only a puppet designer and creator, but also a comic writer, theatrical director,
and media personality. It is impossible
to recreate the Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Shows of the 70s now that the key figures
have passed away, but this documentary gives us a glimpse of what the
theatrical portion of these shows must have been like. There is also footage from a TV talk show
that shows Kawamoto having a comical exchange with his good friend the actress
and TV personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. She teases him about how tiny his studio is
and wonders how he could possibly work in such a cramped space. Kuroyanagi did voice acting for several
Kawamoto puppet animations: The Breaking
of Branches is Forbidden (1968), Rennyo
and his Mother (1981), and The Book
of the Dead (2005).